


Things Shining Everywhere

by TeratoCybernetics



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Grimdark, Horrorterrors - Freeform, baby's first kismesis, generic veilstuck, my little cthulhu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 17:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeratoCybernetics/pseuds/TeratoCybernetics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has never seen you like this, you realise, has not seen anything but the sweetness and light you cling to because you're certain no one wants to see you wrapped in that liquid-dark mantle, would ever want to see you again, after. More fury prickles up your spine, at the idea that everyone thinks all you are is spun sugar and cockleshells, that they are perfectly okay with not knowing more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Shining Everywhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cryptid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptid/gifts).



> Satyrling's prompt; "I'm in need some feverish writhin' shadows Lovecrafty darkfic/art with these two ladies. Some character study delving into Rose's respect for the Elder Gods and the sacrifices she made for their power contrasted with the playful intimacy Feferi has with them by birthright. Some blossoming baby's-first-caliginous romance mixed in would be lovely. Bonus for Grimdark!Feferi."
> 
> ...yeah, it ended up being a bit more from the other side of the equation. By which I mean I think my brain started reading at 'Grimdark Fef' and went nuts. I hope it's still enjoyed. And please forgive some pretension; I wrote this recuperating from New Year's.

When you find her, she is wreathed in black, slick with it. Shadows, of a consistency somewhere between vapour and ice slide off her, trailing, exploring everything she passes like the tentacles of your little friends in the tanks, and you’re not certain what to think as you regard her. It’s not pleasant, whatever it is you feel toward this...girl. This _human_.

  
You pace around her, having found her wandering, in her pajamas, in one of the laboratory’s disused outer hallways for the fourth time in a week. You’d followed the marks of bare alien feet in the dust out of curiosity, out on one of your own walks to escape Eridan. Away from him, and the endless apologies as he follows you around, leaking an irritating pathos like a kicked woofbeast that never, _ever_ stops now you’re alive again, driving you from the series of watery rooms you share with a great deal of awkward tension. Her prints are distinct, smaller than any of the trolls’, unwebbed, unclawed and dainty as a doll’s, surrounded by the less-clear, sinuous marks made by her accompaniment. Above you both, a fluorescent bulb buzzes and flickers as a tendril touches it, steadies as it retracts, leaving a residue that drifts and tastes the surface as if it is alive, clings wetly before disappearing.

  
“You have been following me for days.” There are questions in that statement, like ‘What the fuck do you want?’ and ‘Why do you follow only me, of all of us?’. She speaks like a thesaurus and _everything_ about her manner is at a premium, efficiently winding layers of meaning into the smallest quirk of one white brow. From what you remember learning of the expectations of court life, she'd make a  _fantastic_ courtier.

  
“They speak to you. Why?”

  
“They like the attention?” Echoes, beneath deadpan flippancy, of that of your burden, your caretaker, like static, bringing an upswell of memories. Your eyes narrow at her sarcasm, a hiss rising in your throat, and she looks surprised. You _are_ surprised, at the anger that sparks up and flicks whiplike from the back of your throat to sing behind your eyes, makes you bare teeth at her ever so slightly. She has never seen you like this, you realise, has not seen anything but the sweetness and light you cling to because you're certain no one wants to see you wrapped in that liquid-dark mantle, would ever want to see you again, after. More fury prickles up your spine, at the idea that everyone thinks all you are is spun sugar and cockleshells, that they are perfectly okay with not knowing more.

  
“No, I mean what did you do to _get them_ to talk to you?" You’re looking down your cartilage bump at her, just a little, having drawn yourself up into your Heiress posture, a stance you were made to practice, for hours upon hours. You knew it might be menacing one day, regal, but Rose does not shrink. She still meets your gaze, though her searching tendrils draw back some. You lean in, until you can see every white lash, the texture of her darkened skin, almost like a proper troll’s with its otherworldly stain. Under the glow in her eyes, you see they, too, are much like yours; whitened yellows, irises a watered tyrian, but similar parts, similar layering. “They don’t speak to just anyone. _I’m_ glubbing _royalty_ for whale’s sake. I fed their messenger, and she fed me, protected me. What are you to them?"

  
“One who laboured." She bites off each word, neat as ice crystals, with sad, flat teeth. “One who pored over those names and tales, over sleepless weeks, dreams and nightmares. I worked and hurt for this, to get even the slightest answer to my call." There is truth there; as they move through you like water, you can taste it, smell it, see backwards, inwards, to her troubled sleep and the knowledge written across the inside of her skull.

  
“ _Call?_ " You are incredulous at her hubris, at the gall this tiny thing possesses, and it shivers through your voice, tripling the sound, turning your words into a choir, making it echo weirdly off the walls. Darkness bleeds from your pores, colder than even your blood, and it feels _so good_ to touch this again, like stretching a limb you’ve sat on for too long, All of her draws back, coils defensively, a glassy-shadow arc, tentative-quick as a startled squid. Now, trepidation crawls across her features, closes her pretty, useless, coral-bud mouth. You unfold and twine and coil around her, pinning her shadows with your own and smile slightly at her struggles. Within moments you have her suspended so her toes only brush the floor, legs, arms and spectral extremities all bound tight with the kind of control that comes only from being hatched into this. You have been a vessel carved out from the inside since awareness itself first opened you, unlike this arrogant, clueless little thing shouldering her way through the cracks in reality. “You don’t call them. _They call you and you liste_ _n_. And then, shore as tides, something cracks, in you, leaks, and then you fight to find the ways to tell where you end and they begin before you're lost."

  
She inhales sharply as you take both her hands, smaller than yours, deft and delicate, and so, so warm even under all the black. Tendrils uncoil from your palms, wrap around her wrists, bind your hands palm-to-palm like ritual. You dig the tips of your claws into where her pulse sits, like tithe, drawing just a prickle of her blood. You can taste it where your coronas overlap, salt-sweet and iron through the borrowed cilia waving through your skin.

  
“I _respect_ this power." Her heartrate kicks up, but it's not fear, not entirely. Her jaw is set in her denial, eyes all steel and equally as haughty as you are. Her breath is warm, and you imagine yours is cold to her, from the way the skin along her throat tightens and prickles oddly, turns into bumps. You taste her there with your pointed tongue, run it along the soft space behind her jaw, making her shiver more. She’s all softness, covered in tiny hairs caught with hints of sweat-salt and minerals. Her hands wrap around your wrists, tighten and dig as hard as she can manage, ragged crescents beginning to well with threaded shadow and touches of magenta.

 

“Respect still impfrys they’re waters to dive into when it suits you. Distance. More arrogance." You back up only slightly to meet the challenge in her stare, see your own shining eyes reflected in hers. “You’re like a fish trying to command the waters around it, using polite words out of _glubbing respect_." The last of this comes out snarled, torn disdain.

  
“What do you suggest I do, then?" With this, she leans up and in, as close to your facial fin as you had been to her auricular, only barely not touching, heartbeat easily twice as quick as your own by now and challenge writ in every line of her, in the taut growl beneath her voice that tightens something in you. “-Your _Highness_?"

  
You consider this unexpected retaliation and grin at her. Not a nice grin, not with eldritch colour turning it into a viperfish smile as you set her down, unwind your own tendrils from hers, freeing them to wave aimlessly once again. Her face is pinched, confused and furious, and more than a little flushed from a rush of emotion you can smell, but she leans towards you as you separate, seeking you as north without quite knowing why. It’s only when you have wound all of what you have unfolded back into yourself, only when your arms and hands are properly grey again and you aren’t hearing everything through the static roar of the Outer Circle, that you respond.

 

“Learn. To. Swim." You kiss her, warmth beneath a layer of black frost, and she bites your lip, hard. With some restraint, enough thought given so you don't tear her paperfragile skin open, you return the favour. Then you leave her bleeding in the dust and disrepair, and you don’t look back to see her response.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  _'Little bird, I won't prey on you.  
>  I won't prey on you this time.  
> I'm your faith. I'm your faithhealer.  
> I'm your faithless companion.  
> I'm the seed that made your perfect body.  
> When you sleep, I am awake.  
> There is a light under the ocean.  
> Under the ocean, there's things shining everywhere.  
> -Belly, 'King'_   
> 


End file.
